Over the years, people have asked, "What is the difference between ping pong and table tennis." A usual response is often "ping pong is a fun social activity whereas table tennis is a competitive sport." Here in Estes Park, there is a long standing club with a mix of both Ping Pong and Table Tennis players. We play by the United States Table Tennis Association (USTTA) rules every Monday and now an additional night - Thursday, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Mountain View Bible Fellowship gym located at 1575 South Saint Vrain Avenue in Estes Park. Most of games are played as doubles, and teams mix it up every 30 minutes. There are opportunities for lessons and practice.

The cost to play has not kept up with the times - a one time initiation fee of $5 plus $1 per night. The club uses that money for balls, paddles and table repairs. It also gives a quarterly donations to church.

Originally, the Rocky Mountain Athletic Club allowed the group to use their basement each Monday night for the club's playing time. The club then moved to Good Samaritan Village for one year before finding its current home at the Mountain View Bible Fellowship gym.

History of table tennis

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The sport got its start in England towards the end of the 19th century when, after dinner, some upper-middle class Victorians decided to turn their dining room tables into miniature versions of the traditional lawn tennis playing field. Several different every-day objects were employed in constructing the sport. They used a line of books as the net. Rackets were lids from empty cigar boxes, and a little later, parchment paper stretched around a frame. The ball would be either a ball of string, or perhaps more commonly, a champagne cork or rubber ball.

When the game first started it was called by a number of different names. "Whif whaf," "gossamer," and "flim flam" were commonly used to describe it. The words, as can be assumed, were derived from the sound that the ball made when hit back and forth on the table. In 1901 though, English manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd registered one of the more popular names, Ping-Pong, as a copyright. He later sold the trademark to the Parker Brothers in the United States. Then in the 1920's the name and the sport were revived in Europe as table tennis.

The turn of the century brought many other refinements to the sport. Players started using celluloid balls after the English man James Gibb discovered them during a trip to the United States in 1901 and proved them to be perfect for Ping-Pong. In 1903, E.C Goode replaced parchment paper and cigar box lids with pimpled rubber on light wooden "blades" as rackets. And after the world championships in Prague in 1936, where two defensive players took over an hour to contest one point, the net was lowered to make the pace of the game-play faster. (In another effort to make the game faster paced and entertaining, rules were again changed in 2001.

Also around this time, the sport spread to other European countries and to the United States. Asian countries like China, Korea and Japan are understood to have learnt about it from British Army officers who held posts in those places. There was an unofficial world championship held in 1901, but the first official world championship was held in London in 1927 by the International Table Tennis Federation. The ITTF was founded in Berlin in 1926 by England, Sweden, Hungary, India, Denmark, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Wales.

Although it may seem today that the sport, in the professional realm, is dominated by Asian countries such as China and Korea, it wasn't always that way. Before the late 1950s and early 60s, European players from Hungary especially, but also from France and Sweden, seemed without competition. But in 1952, Japanese player Horoi Satoh introduced the foam rubber paddle. The paddle made the game faster and spinning the ball became an even greater factor. Japan became the leading winner in the world competitions in 1960, and by the mid 1960s China took over the reigns through to the early 1980s. Their absolute domination of the sport was finally subdued with the entering of table tennis into the Olympic Games in 1988 and the participation of players from Korea and Sweden.

On April 6, 1971, the US table tennis team was invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to play in China. Four days later, nine players, four officials and two spouses crossed the bridge from Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland. They were the first group of Americans to be allowed into the country since the communist take-over in 1949. One of the first signs during the cold war of improved relations between the United States and China, Time magazine called it "the pong heard throughout the world." It was shortly followed with a visit to China by President Nixon.